April 1, 2020
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 10
Mango tree. “We are all in this together, and whatever we can do – sing, write, invent, dance, play drums, tell stories, read poems aloud – will save us.”
Dear All,
I’m writing a mid-month letter to keep in touch, as in the last two weeks, time has both stood still and seemed to be going on forever, and things change so fast. I hope this finds you all well and in good spirits…as far as possible. Maybe you are writing, reading, watching screened movies – we are all desperate for narrative, outcomes and insight. I was going to write “at a time like this” – but really, there has been no other time quite like this.
People ask me “Are you writing?” and the answer is, hardly at all. It’s an ideal time for getting down to something, sure, but the something these days seems to be the business of staying well, fed, alive and in touch with those we love. But there are probably brave souls out there writing new poems, plays, even novels, new versions perhaps of the Decameron by Boccaccio – with added social distancing - Camus’ The Plague – suddenly become a best-seller – or Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. I hope so. What they will look like, sound like, is impossible to imagine – maybe plays like Sartre’s Huis Clos (“No Exit”) or with Beckett-like people stuck in place; maybe apocalyptic visions or sketches of a world to come. Poetry lives well in a crisis – it always does. I read about Iranians hanging out banners with poems on them from their balconies, much as the Italians played music and sang from theirs. Poetry relies on neither narrative nor outcome; it flourishes in the wild places of human experience. But, fiction? A friend sent on a parody of the first lines of well-known novels. “Mrs. Dalloway said that she would buy the flowers herself. Then she realized that of course the florist was shut and the party cancelled.”
The whole party has been cancelled, world-wide.
I have been working on an old-fashioned novel in which people go out to dinner, take planes to places, and even touch each other. The whole world of this book is now – I hope temporarily – out of date. All novels deal with time, space and human interaction. For now, maybe the plot is what happens within the closed spaces of locked-down houses and apartments, what happens on the phone, or when the characters look out of the window into empty streets. We’ll see. Fantasy may flourish, or science-fiction, or sheer nostalgia for last month, last year.
For now, it seems important to notice, record and communicate. These days that pass like Groundhog Day, or a nightmare, or simply comfortable house arrest, depending on where you are, may bear fruit in fiction one day, but for now I want to notice what is happening, the shifts of feeling, the weather, the plants that flourish here around me, the color of the ocean, which we can’t visit but that is cleaning itself gradually now that its water is not churned up by cruise ships and jet skis, and of the quieter, cleaner sky. I want to remember the kindness and helpfulness that is, in spite of fear, growing between people who realize now how essentially we need each other. So, I’d like to encourage journal-writing, that allows both for introspection and paying attention to what is around us. Poets will write poems, no doubt about that. Everyone can have a try at a poem. And singing is good, and dancing in one’s room. The other day I paused on my way home from a walk, outside the house of a friend who is a jazz drummer and listened to him playing behind his shutters as if he had an audience – which he did, as I stood invisible to him, loving his rhythms. We never know who will receive our art.
We are all in this together, and whatever we can do – sing, write, invent, dance, play drums, tell stories, read poems aloud – will save us. I think we’ll come through it, into a different world – but meanwhile, let’s celebrate the one we’re in, with all its rules and restrictions and obligations to change our ways. Here, the mocking-birds are nest-building, taking no notice of us at all, and I hear them sing from dawn to nightfall as they go on their way.
Affectionately, Ros
As well as Without Her, my first novel, A Day To Remember to Forget, is now available from the Book Depository and of course Amazon. I wrote it 50 years ago and it now has an introduction by Dame Margaret Drabble.